Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Today's Political and Oxygen News, but not an April Fools' joke

Well, I'm back on Oxygen. Monday morning, when I went to the
VA for rehab, I de-saturated my oxygen level to 85% just walking in. Safe
levels are 90% and above. I did the same Friday, but it came back and stayed in
the 90+% range. Monday it came back, but de-saturated to the high 80s after
each set of exercise--I only did three things, five sets each. I went to the
men's room, about 15 yards tops, and was lightheaded when I got there, de-saturated
to 83% by the time I returned. I sat for ten minutes and it only came back to
87%. So I called the Transplant Coordinator, and he talked to the
pulmonologist. They decided to put me back on oxygen for activity, which came
Tuesday, with the tanks, hoses and concentrator. I thought they might keep me
at the VA, but they sent me home, thankfully. I still have the bronchoscopy
scheduled for Thursday, 4/11. So the fight goes on. Will try to keep everyone
posted. ~Bob

This novel was recommended in The Week news magazine by a "best books" list
contributor. I had not read anything else by the author, Edward Jones, a
Pulitzer Prize winner. It is a story of a little-known facet of American
history, Southern free black slave owners before the Civil War and
emancipation. (According to "Black Slave Owners" by Joseph Holloway
on http://slaverebellion.org/index.php?page=the-black-slave-owners,
there were 3,000 free black slave owners in New Orleans in 1860 and over 400 in
Charleston, SC in 1830.) Americans, thanks to our "education" system,
and a media and political class vested in creating a feeling of helpless
victimhood in black Americans, tend to believe that slavery was purely a
phenomenon of whites owning blacks for a few hundred years in the American
south. In fact, as Dr. Thomas Sowell points out in his excellent essay,
"The Real History of Slavery," every people were enslaved at some
point, most often by folks just like them, and every culture accepted slavery
and practiced it, until our much-maligned western culture turned against it.
For example, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, which legally abolished
slavery way back in 1981, has recently agreed with the UN to actually try to
eradicate slavery. Sowell points out that during the same period when 500,000
African slaves were brought to what became the United States, a million white
Europeans were kidnapped into slavery in Muslim North Africa. And there are no
records of the millions of blacks taken into slavery by Muslims. I have read
that white slaves were still being sold in Cairo 20 years after Lee surrendered to
Grant. Getting a feel for this different perspective is one reason to read this
novel. But the author's ear for dialog, eye for detail and command of the
language will be the envy of other writers and a joy to readers. He creates
life stories and a sense of place that make it had to accept that this is
fiction. You can't help but believe that "this is the way it was." So
it works on many levels. The only off-kilter note was his assertion that blacks
didn't take surnames until after emancipation, a very small quibble. This is
amply refuted, along with much of the demeaning but politically-valuable
contemporary myth of blacks as helpless victims of slavery, in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom.
But, like that well-researched history, this novel presents blacks in slavery
as a resilient and adaptable people coping as best they could with a great
evil, and struggling to hold family together--doing a better job than a large
percentage of Americans today, despite far easier conditions. I highly
recommend it.

http://Healthcare.gov on Obamacare
deadline day "We're currently performing maintenance. Please try again
later." pic.twitter.com/f6tZFc4tOG
(March 31st was the Obamacare "firm deadline." Ha! Obamacare has no
firm deadlines anymore than any of Obama's promises are firm. All subject to
polls and political whims. ~Bob)

Obama promised the ACA would "bend the cost
curve." He just got the direction of the bend wrong. ~Bob. Excerpt: Health
care spending rose at the fastest pace in 10 years last quarter, a development
that could foreshadow higher costs for consumers this year. Expenses for health
care rose at a 5.6% annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Bureau of Economic
Analysis said last week. The jump triggered a sharp upward revision in the
government's estimate of consumer spending overall and accounted for nearly a
quarter of the economy's 2.6% annualized growth in the last three months of
2013.

Dr. Goodman's Health Alert Blog is free at ncpa.org and
worth subscribing to. ~Bob. Excerpt: As readers of this blog might suspect, the
(ObamaCare) contraceptives issue is not of much concern to me. It is of
interest only because it reflects the mindlessness that permeates so much of
the Affordable Care Act. In a free market, no one would ever purchase insurance
coverage for contraceptives, any more than they would use health insurance to
pay for seatbelts or airbags in automobiles. Because of their low cost almost
everybody can afford contraceptives and if price is a deterrent they are
available for free from local public health authorities or from such private organizations
as Planned Parenthood. Further, how did anyone ever get the idea that people
should give up their First Amendment rights when they incorporate? This issue
goes far beyond the Hobby
Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases now before the Supreme
Court. I don’t think the federal government should be able to put the
executives at Pfizer in jail if they distribute an article from the New
England Journal of Medicine describing an off label use of a Pfizer drug.
Pfizer executives should have the same free speech rights as anyone else. But
here is something else that should be of interest to all of us: why would
Congress pass a law mandating free contraceptives but leave people exposed for
thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket costs if they need bypass surgery? I have
been trying to explain this phenomenon to people for 30 years — ever since I
discovered similar
anomalies in the British National Health Service.

If there's one saying that's
tried and "true" in DC, it's that Republicans are the "party of
the rich." Except it's a lie. The latest example is a report that of the
10 wealthiest House districts, eight are represented by Democrats, including
the top six. Most of them are in New York and California, and the three that aren't are outside New York City or Washington,
DC. The AP helpfully notes,
"Democrats say the 'party of the rich' label is more about policies than
constituents." We suppose there'ssometruth to that,
because Republican -- well, conservative -- policies help people getrich. Democrats
prefer to keep their subjects poor while raking in the dough from the rich.

HBO's Bill Maher is a leftist of leftists who holds no
punches when it comes to fighting the Right, but he tripped up some fellow
travellers on race. First he quoted Paul Ryan on the
causes of poverty and led a panel discussion on whether racism was at
play in those comments. Predictably, the two leftists on the panel, one of whom
was black comedian W. Kamau Bell, thought Ryan's comments belied racism. So
Maher asked them to weigh in on this statement: "When it comes to getting
an education, too many of our young people just can't be bothered. They're
sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of
dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they're
fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper." When he revealed that it
was Michelle Obama, not Paul Ryan, who said that, his guests had to wipe egg
off their faces. Bell
pathetically explained, "She was talking to black people -- we talk to
each other differently than how we talk in front of you." That's precisely
the point. (I saw the clip. He first told them it was a Ryan quote. But
Michelle was saying about the same thing--that was okay. Ryan is wrong, though,
it's not just the inner cities. Young, rural white males are picking up the
same "no work" ethic. As the excellent, and well-researched book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by
Charles Murray makes clear, young white men are also losing the work ethic
in the cities. It's worth reading [http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396379785&sr=8-1&keywords=Coming+Apart]
and the clip is worth viewing. ~Bob)

Bill Maher Tricks Guests With ‘Racist’ Paul Ryan Quote That
Was Actually Said by Michelle Obama — The Reaction He Gets Is Priceless. By Jason
Howerton

Excerpt: Many people are lamenting the bad consequences of
Barack Obama's foreign policy, and some are questioning his competence. There
is much to lament, and much to fear. Multiple setbacks to American interests
have been brought on by Obama's policies in Libya,
Egypt, Syria, Crimea and — above all — in what seems
almost certain to become a nuclear Iran in the very near future.

Excerpt: President Obama talks about Vladimir Putin as if he
were a Pennsylvania
“clinger” who operates on outdated principles, who is driven by fear, and whom
unfortunately the post-Enlightenment mind of even Barack Obama cannot always
reach. Deconstruct a recent CBS News interview with President Obama, and the
limitations of his now-routine psychoanalyses are all too clear.

Seniors move from a
reliably Democratic to a reliably Republican group

Excerpt: U.S seniors -- those aged 65 and older -- have
moved from a reliably Democratic group to a reliably Republican one over the
past two decades. From 1992 through 2006, seniors had been solidly Democratic
and significantly more Democratic than younger Americans. Over the last seven
years, seniors have become less Democratic, and have shown an outright
preference for the Republican Party since 2010. (Gee, do you think it has anything to do with the fact that
Obamacare is cutting Medicare? --Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt.)

Excerpt: Immigration agents tried to deport only about a fourth
of the cases they encountered in 2013, said a report being released Monday from the Center for Immigration Studies that shows
just how much President Obama’s policies have cut down on potential
enforcement. Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author, called it
a form of “catch and release.” ... Of those let go, 68,000 had criminal
convictions on their records.

Excerpt: What neither the film nor the president mentioned
was that Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union, was a fierce
opponent of illegal immigration and supporter of tight border controls. That’s
why it’s fitting to observe March 31 each year as National Border Control Day,
in honor of the farmworker leader.

Excerpt: Residents in a coastal town along the Syria-Turkey
border with a significant Armenian population face new
threats after rebels seized control of
their town from forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad a week ago.
Some of the rebels are from the al-Qaida-tied Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Nusra
Front, which the United
Statesdesignated as a
terrorist group.

Yu will have to create an account and log in--worth doing.
~Bob. Excerpt: Some people seem to think that the description “black
conservative” is an oxymoron. The truth is, if we truly have equality in America, blacks
should be as free as anyone else to determine their own political and
philosophical positions. Although most people in America would think it ludicrous to
presume that a white person was liberal or conservative based on their skin,
many of the same people seem shocked when they hear a black American expressing
conservative views in public.

excerpt: South Korean Marines fired artillery shells across
a disputed sea border Monday after North Korean shells from a live
fire drill conducted by Pyongyang fell into
the water south of the frontier, Seoul officials
told the Associated Press. There were no reports of any injuries.

Excerpt: With President Obama calling inequality "the
defining challenge of our time," much of our political discourse of late
has focused on income distribution in the United States. But what most
Americans understand about inequality is based on three false assumptions: that
inequality is inherently unjust, that it is bad for the economy and that
government redistribution is the best remedy. Based on these assumptions,
advocates for greater equality push for tax increases and minimum wage hikes in
order to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the working classes, say
researchers with the American Enterprise Institute. Research on income
inequality often varies because there is no common definition of
"income," says American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar Aparna
Mathur. ... American Enterprise Institute Fellow Jonah Goldberg explains that
liberals, in general, view inequality as a systemic problem -- that income is a
sort of common good that should be distributed evenly.

Excerpt: A recent analysis of existing school choice
research conducted by researcher Greg Forster found that school choice helps
all students -- even those who remain in public schools, says Lindsey Burke, an
education fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Of 12 random assignment studies,
11 of them demonstrated that school choice improved student outcomes, and none
of the studies showed a negative effect on student outcomes. Moreover, of the
23 studies that have been conducted analyzing the impact of school choice on
the students who remain in traditional public schools, 22 of them found that
school choice improves those students' outcomes as well. Research has found
improvements across a number of variables: (Except that opposing school choice,
while it screws kids, improves Democrat voting outcomes and political
contributions from teachers union members. ~Bob)

Excerpt: The juxtaposition of recent images was jarring:
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel unveiling a defense budget that substantially
shrinks the U.S. Army, while insisting that “after Iraq
and Afghanistan,
we are no longer sizing the military to conduct long and large stability operations.”
And then there were the images of masked Russian troops seizing Crimea
and threatening to carve apart Ukraine
with naked aggression. President Barack Obama has honed the themes of military
restraint and economic renewal into something like a doctrine – a core
principle around which national security and foreign affairs policies could be
organized and prioritized.

Excerpt: The poll tell us, among other things, that this
president is much less respected by the troops he leads than his predecessor: When
it comes to their most-senior commander, the vets decisively prefer [President]
George W. Bush to [President] Obama.

Excerpt: Last Saturday night students from the University of Arizona
in Tucson filed
out into the streets and rioted. Their cause? Their team lost their Elite 8
match in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I'm not surprised; this is what
spoiled liberal kids do....and Tucson
has been a liberal mess for a while now.

Excerpt: Irony alert: The Democrats’ biggest challenge this
fall is to get their voters excited about a law that they asked for. Obamacare
will be a huge voting issue for Republicans — that’s already clear. They’ll
turn out in droves because they hate the law. What’s less clear is how
Democrats will get their supporters to the polls to say, “hey, thanks for
health reform.” And yet, the Affordable Care Act only exists because Democrats
and their supporters had pushed for health reform for decades.

Excerpt: The sect sang that their demand for Sharia cannot
be compromised. They restated that their targets remained churches, Christians
and the Nigerian state. Part of the song stated, "We are working for Allah
and must bring Shariah to existence; we are committed to protecting Muslims
from being annihilated by infidels. We are going to kill them. We will enter
Churches and slaughter Christians and barracks. We are calling on all Muslims
to come out and fight Jihad.

Excerpt: “Isn’t it breaking up a family if husband goes to
jail for beating up wife,” said veiled woman legislator from Jamiat
Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl Fauzia Bibi justifying domestic violence by giving different
cultural and religious perspectives. She ended up saying the passage of the
bill would westernise the society.

Excerpt: Twenty-one people have been killed in an attempt to
escape from detention at the headquarters of Nigeria's secret police in the
capital, officials say. Police said the trouble started when a prisoner beat a
guard with his handcuffs in an attempt to escape.

Excerpt: Former Sen. Bob Kerrey said President Barack Obama
must have known he was lying when he told Americans they could keep their
insurance plans under his signature healthcare reform act. "He had to know
he was misleading the audience," the Nebraska Democrat said about Obama's
pledge as he was touting his Affordable Care Act. In an interview with
the Daily Mail, he said, "'On the other hand, he may
have said it so many times that the spell-checker wasn't in the room — the
spell-checker, the fact-checker — somebody who says, 'Excuse me, Mr. President,
but I hope you know this.'" (Wow, a longtime Democrat comes out and
frankly criticizes Obama for lying and the Democrats for pushing so many
entitlements? He is now persona non grata in the Party. Maybe he
figures that distancing himself from Obama is a better way to get elected. He
could be right. But in the meantime, this is going to mess things up for the
Democrats. That is, if we see this story in the regular media......Del. Kerrey
holds the MOH from Vietnam.
~Bob)

Of Course: Obamacare Navigators Helping People Enroll
At Mexican Consulates

Buying votes from future Democrats with money borrowed from
your grandkis. The collapse is coming. ~Bob. Excerpt: The Obama administration
has been helping to facilitate a series of events nationwide at Mexican
Consulate offices to enroll people in Obamacare – and a key activist says the
efforts are “our responsibility” regardless of citizenship. “Whether they’re
Mexican nationals or whether they’re United
States citizens or whether they’re in transition-- and if
they’re there it is our responsibility within all of America to educate on the
Affordable Care Act,” Enroll America Field Organizer Jose Medrano told
Breitbart News on Wednesday. (OK, I guess I'm a little dense. I thought that
the ACA was about health care for AMERICANS. Apparently that is not the case. So
will we start enrolling Canadians, if our plan is cheaper than theirs? What
about the other South American countries that have a bunch of people here, and
the Phillipines too? Is this how they get the numbers up, by pulling in every
foreigner living here, and remember, nobody at ObamaCare is going to ask
anything about your citizenship. Absolutely not, why would anyone even have
that thought cross their mind? Oh, and keep in mind, if the people applying
happen to be poor, we taxpayers get to pay for the subsidies they get so they
can still enroll in ObamaCare. Isn't that nice? --Del)

Excerpt: Five Taliban gunmen stormed a US charity group’s guesthouse in Kabul Friday, killing two
civilians and wounding four guards before being killed by security forces. The
Taliban militants barricaded themselves inside the guesthouse run by San
Francisco-based NGO group Roots
of Peace and managed to hold four foreigners hostage. (It takes to
sides to make peace, only one to make war, but the dreamers never learn. ~Bob.)

Exclusive: U.S. Taxpayers To Spend $400,000 For A Camel
Sculpture In Pakistan

Excerpt: Shhh! Don’t let this news be aired about too much!
Think about the damage it could do if a majority of Americans knew that this kind
of thing was happening! “Talk about extreme, militant Islamists and the
atrocities that they have perpetrated globally might undercut the positive
achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue
with devout Muslims.” — Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester,
Massachusetts, February 8, 2013

Excerpt: Monday's open enrollment deadline for
ObamaCare, which, with its subsidies and tax credits, represents the largest
expansion of government, is a good time to assess the total scale of government
in the US.

Three Marines were attacked early Sunday morning
after police say they defended a woman wearing an Angels jersey arguing with
two men in a Dodgers jersey....The passing Marines reportedly got involved when
the conflict escalated and tried to help the woman. Police say two Marines were
stabbed, one of them cut with a broken bottle in front of police.

Excerpt: Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered British intelligence agencies to investigate
Muslim Brotherhood activities in his country. The move follows orders by Egypt and Saudi
Arabia to outlaw the group, and allegations that its
members plotted terrorist attacks from offices in Britain. British newspapers
confirmed an original report in the Times of London about
Cameron's order. (And if the trail leads to the White House? ~Bob)

WaPo Fact Checker on DWS: Do 60 percent of women use
‘birth control’ for something other than family planning?

Excerpt: “When 99 percent of women used birth control in
their lifetime and 60 percent use it for something other than family planning,
it’s outrageous and I think the Supreme Court will suggest that their case is
ridiculous.” – Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, Democratic National Committee
chair, on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” March 25, 2014. ... Wasserman Schultz used
numbers from well-documented studies but without the right context. In
particular, the claim that 60 percent of women use “birth control” for
something other than family planning is overstated, as the more correct figure
is 14 percent — and the pill is used by less than one-third of sexually active
women. Two Pinocchios.

CIA officer confirmed
no protests before misleading Benghazi
account given

Excerpt: Before the Obama
administration gave an inaccurate narrative on national
television that the Benghazi attacks grew from an anti-American protest, the CIA’s
station chief in Libya pointedly
told his superiors in Washington that no such demonstration occurred, documents
and interviews with current and former intelligence officials show. The attack
was “not an escalation of protests,” the station chief wrote to then-Deputy CIA Director Michael J. Morell in
an email dated Sept. 15, 2012 — a full day before the White House sent Susan E. Rice to
several Sunday talk shows to disseminate talking points claiming that the
Benghazi attack began as a protest over an anti-Islam video. (If a Republican
president and his team had lied like this, the media would be beating
impeachment drums. ~Bob)